Most people our age have grown up hearing about greenhouse gases and their effects on the environment, how they contribute to the changes in climate that we’re seeing around us. While greenhouse gases may seem like a new development, the reality is that we’ve known about their presence for a while. This leads to the question: “who discovered greenhouse gases?”

A quick google will tell you that John Tyndall, an Irish physicist, discovered and set our foundational understanding of greenhouse gases, and throughout much of history this achievement was accredited to him. In actuality however, Eunice Foote, an American climate scientist performed the experiments that proved the existence of greenhouse gases.

Eunice Foote was a pioneer in her field. She performed experiments in the 1850s that demonstrated the ability of atmospheric water vapor and carbon dioxide to have an effect on solar heating. Her experiments foreshadowed John Tyndall’s later experiments that illustrated the workings of Earth’s greenhouse effect — she beat him by at least three years!

Drawing of Eunice Foote by Carlyn Iverson, NOAA Climate.gov.

Despite her incredible contributes and remarkable insight into the influence of raised CO2 levels on the Earth’s temperature, she went forgotten in the history of climate scientists until very recently.

Foote utilized glass cylinders, each encasing a mercury thermometer, and found that the heating effect of the sun was greater in moist air than dry air, and that it was highest in a cylinder containing CO2. While her experimental design was simple and didn’t give to much insight into the exact nature of how things worked, Foote was still able to draw remarkable insight from her studies, writing in 1856:

“An atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature; and if as some suppose, at once a period of its history the air had mixed with it a larger proportion than present, an increased temperature…must necessarily resulted.”

Her findings were presented in August of 1856 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) by a male colleague, Joseph Henry. Her paper, nor Henry’s presentation of it, were included in the proceedings of the conference however.

Foote’s paper “Circumstances affecting the heat of Sun’s rays.”

A summary of her work was published in the 1857 volume of Annual of Scientific Discovery by David A.Wells. When reporting on the meeting, Wells wrote: “Prof. Henry then read a paper by Mrs. Eunice Foote, prefacing it with a few words, to the effect that science was of no country and of no sex. The sphere of a woman embraces not only the beautiful and the useful, but the true.”

Her work was later used in a column of the September 1856 issue of the Scientific American to counter the held sentiment that “women do not possess the strength of mind necessary for scientific investigation.” The writer highlighted that her experiments were direct evidence to the contrary: “ the experiments of Mrs.Foote afford abundant evidence of the ability of woman to investigate any subject with originality and precision.”

While much has changed since the time of Eunice Foote, there is still much work to be done to acknowledge the past contributions of women scientists and ensure that future efforts do not go unseen.

In 2016, the movie Hidden Figures came out, detailing the incredible contributions made by Katherine Johnson that made the Apollo Missions to the moon possible. Without her doing the math by hand, we would have never achieved the incredible feat that we did. Unfortunately, most still do not know her name. Her name is Katherine Johnson.

Katherine Johnson, sitting at her desk at NASA.

As the United States was facing World War II, the push for aeronautical advancement led to a increasing demand for mathematicians, people who could crunch the numbers and allow engineers to focus on the other aspects of their tasks. In other words, there was a growing need for “Human Computers” to carry out the complex mathematics before digital computers were available to handle that burden. Women were the obvious solution for these highly computational roles. Katherine Johnson was one of the “West Computers,” designated these name after the building to which they resided.

Katherine was gifted with numbers from an early age: she started attending high school at 10 years old, and graduated with honors from West Virginia State College with bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and French. In 1953 she began her work at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics West Area Computing unit where she analyzed test data and provided mathematical computation that was vital to the success of the U.S. space program at the time.

Her contributions stem far beyond her work on the Apollo Mission as she became the first woman in her devision to received credit as an author of a research report; as a member of the Space Task Group she coauthored a paper on how to place spacecraft in orbit in 1960. She went on to author/coauthor 26 research reports throughout her career.

Astronauts of the Mercury Program: the first U.S. space explorers.

She played a crucial role in NASA’s Mercury program from 1961-1963 which was for the development of crewed spaceflights. In 1961, she calculated the path for Freedom 7, the spacecraft that put the first U.S. astronaut into space (Alan B. Shepard Jr.). In 1962, at the request of the astronaut John Glenn, Katherine verified by hand that the electronic computer had planned his flight correctly. Glenn went on to make history about the Friendship 7, as he became the first U.S. astronaut to orbit the Earth. Most notably, she was a part of the team that calculated where and when to launch the rocket for the Apollo 11 mission, which sent the first three men to the moon.

Clearly, without Katherine Johnson, we would not have the NASA we know today. Perhaps even the Space Race and Cold War would have ended up differently if not for her incredible accomplishments and contributions to NASA’s space program. Given how impactful her efforts are on our everyday lives, we should all know the name Katherine Johnson.